Cape Town - Disgruntled black advocates have lambasted the government for not implementing policies and laws aimed at transforming the legal profession.
A “dire lack of transformation” in the industry has spurred advocate Pearl Mathibela, who is on the Cape Bar, to undertake a month-long protest outside Parliament.
Advocates for Transformation, a group of 63 advocates, has echoed Mathibela’s sentiments, saying there are currently only 100 black State prosecutors out of 600 in the province.
“After many unsuccessful attempts to secure an audience with government to find solutions, we were left with no choice but to stage protests,” Mathibela said.
The protest action started on March 30 and is due to end on April 30. Mathibela said while she applauds the government’s efforts to transform the profession, it is the lack of implementation of those policies and laws that black advocates are aggrieved by.
“We will celebrate Freedom Day on April 27, but for many historically disadvantaged lawyers the freedom won rings hollow as they continue to be marginalised and discriminated against on the basis that existed before 1994 - that being mainly race and gender.”
Last year, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, in partnership with the Foundation for Human Rights, conducted a field study on transformation in the legal industry.
“The research found that lawyers were experiencing a range of hostility and exclusionary conduct based particularly on race and gender. Those findings hold true for the whole country,” said Mathibela.
“Government continues to reserve quality work for untransformed law firms and counsel. The reality is that historically white private institutions, including law firms, are simply not using the services of black practitioners,” she said.
The provincial chairman of Advocates for Transformation, Gregory Papier, has been on the Cape Bar for 20 years and shares Mathibela’s sentiments.
“In Cape Town, you have your big rich white firms who have their networks of white attorneys and they keep business within those networks,” he said.
Papier said there was an apparent trend in the industry where white attorneys are trusted and black attorneys are believed to be inadequate, citing big cases.
“The white attorneys will lead the case, while a few black attorneys do the skippy work. This is a mindset which hinders transformation.”
Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Development spokesman Mthunzi Mhaga said the department was tackling the imbalances of the past to transform legal services, mentioning policy in effect.
“Subsequently, the number of briefs allocated to black lawyers continues to increase annually and is currently standing at 76 percent.”
Cape Times